The month of September is around the corner; it is almost upon us. If they haven’t already started, speculations will soon start on when Buhari will actually announce the members of his federal cabinet and what women and men will be in the cabinet. In starting this week’s column with these observations, I do not myself wish to start what, for the most part, I consider idle speculations. There isn’t anything special about the President’s choice of September, more than three months after his inauguration, as the month in which he would announce the members of his cabinet to the country. I mean, for all we know, he could as well have chosen August, October or even November. But he did choose September and I for one wish to give him the benefit of the doubt that September was not a random choice. And this is why I am invoking the trope of “Septemberists” in this article to explore the possibility, the necessity even, that members of Buhari’s cabinet might turn out to be women and men that in experience, abilities and impact, will be unprecedented in our country’s political history. What does this trope of “Septemberists” allude to; what does it mean? And why am I invoking it here when I am absolutely certain that Buhari and his advisers do not have the events in European and world history to which the trope alludes in mind at all?
Our comments on the “Septemberists” will be shorter. Known in the Portuguese language as “Setembristas”, they got their appellation from their successful revolt of September 9, 1836 against Queen Maria 11. Their revolt was essentially against the terrible inefficiency, corruption and backwardness of Portuguese monarchical rule in the period of European colonial and imperial overseas adventures. In effect, they were liberals and “modernizers” who wished to lay the foundations of sound and efficient constitutional rule in feudal Portugal. One of their most notable actions was the prohibition of slavery in Portugal itself and all overseas Portuguese colonies. Ultimately, their success was short-lived, the British joining forces with the Portuguese crown to crush them.
In order for this excursion into European and world history to have any pertinence to the subject of this essay, this being the potential impact of Buhari’s cabinet to be announced in a September that is only days away, we must be able to discern in present-day Nigeria a movement among our politicians and technocrats that can be adjudged to have the same liberal, progressive and modernizing worldview, values and dedication as the “Septemberists” of Portuguese revolutionary history. Please note that “September” happened to be merely incidental to the more substantial nature and impact of Portugal’s 19th century “Septemberists”. If their revolt had taken place in the month of October, they would have been called “Octobrists”. In this case, we are in the happy circumstance of being able to match the month of the announcement and institution of Buhari’s cabinet with a term that already exists in world history as a term with quite portentous significance. In other words, by their deeds ye shall know them: if Buhari’s cabinet proves to be exceptional in relation to all the cabinets we have ever had in this country, it will be our closest equivalent to the “Septemberists” of history.
Last week, in his column in this newspaper, Tatalo Alamu declared assertively that we are more or less in “revolutionary times”. I do not wish to take issue with that declaration; I merely wish to reflect on it with specific regard to the issue of those who will be on the ramparts of the administrative machinery of governance for the next four years. Will they make a difference in the lives, the yearnings, the aspirations of the majority or generality of Nigerians? Will they make a substantial departure from the mediocrity, the corruption and the inefficiency of the PDP era that reached the peak in the Jonathan administration? If it is the case that we are now living in revolutionary times, like all revolutions the Buhari “revolution” must have its revolutionaries. But so far, in the National Assembly and in the agencies and parastatals for which the President has appointed managerial heads, no “revolutionaries” have surfaced. As a matter of fact, it could be argued that in the National Assembly, the exact opposite is what we have seen: the seizure of power by counter-revolutionaries.
Concerning the President as head of state and head of government, Buhari has himself humorously and rather fetchingly acknowledged the fact that Nigerians have given him the nickname of “Baba Go-Slow”. He is difficult, he is challenging to read. He is not exactly like a closed book, but neither is he an open book. He contested for the presidency four times and only won the fourth time. Thus, he had all the time in the world to work out a vision of what he wanted to do, what he wanted to achieve with power. For unlike military coups where you seize power first and then scramble around trying to find out what to do with it, in an epic electoral quest lasting more than twelve years, Buhari should have come to office prepared from day one with a clear sense of what to do and where to go. And if we grant that with the doctrine and the practice of separation of powers Buhari could not have done much to avert the seizure of power in the National Assembly by the “counter-revolutionaries”, it has to be admitted that the President is in full control in the executive branch of government. If that is the case, nearly four months since his election is a long time to wait to find out what caliber of men and women he will select for his cabinet.
Ben Nwabueze has suggested that the long delay in Buhari’s announcement of the members of his cabinet is nothing other than the manifestation of a lingering holdover of autocratic predilections from the time when the President was a military dictator. This may or may not be true. Definitely, there are other rather more mundane explanations for this long delay. One of such explanations is the fact that country was left so broke, so close to the edge of bankruptcy by the Jonathan administration that putting a cabinet in place right away after electoral victory was not one of the priorities of the new administration. This is certainly true of many of the state governors, many of whom, finding totally emptied treasuries in the state capitals when they took over from the departing former governors, actually “saved” a lot by deliberately being slow, being unhurried in appointing members of their cabinets: if you don’t have commissioners, special advisers, personal assistants and protocol officers, you don’t have to pay their huge salaries and allowances.
Sooner or later, sooner rather than later, Buhari will announce the names of the members of his cabinet. I am not betting on it, but I hope that they will be like the “Septemberists” whose role in a short episode of European and world history I have invoked in this essay, together with their legacy. I am in particular looking forward to the people who will fill the slots for two Ministries, these being Justice and Education. In the last four weeks in this column, I have focused rather single-mindedly on how the law, through the agency of senior lawyers, magistrates and judges became the perfect and almost inviolable shield and protector of those who looted our national coffers on an unprecedented scale. With the passage of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015 into law, the new Minister of Justice and Attorney General will have a powerful, almost invincible weapon against this entrenchment of Bar and Bench in service of corruption in Nigeria. Only someone in the mold of the “Septemberists” can be expected to make this possible. Let us recall here what the “Septemberists” stood for: a liberal, progressive and modernizing overhaul of the inefficiency, corruption and backwardness of the monarchical order of feudal Portugal.
To the last of my days on this side of the grave, I shall remain in bafflement why not one of the Ministers of Education in the PDP era failed to declare a state of emergency at all levels and areas of our educational system – primary, secondary and tertiary; private and public; denominational and non-denominational. Pupils were failing at historically astronomically high rates and yet not once did any Minister of Education seriously express a sense of crisis. And ironically, some of the Ministers concerned were themselves members of the academic profession!
These two Ministries are not alone, they do not stand apart from the general rot; they are indeed symptomatic. The last impression I wish to leave is that the cabinet, the ministries exist in isolation and can therefore be “saved” by supermen and women that in this essay I am calling “Septemberists”. The historical “Septemberists” were not individual technocrats or politicians seeking to make a name or a fortune for themselves; above all else, they were members of a movement in Portuguese politics, culture and society with a pronounced and consistent dedication to liberal, progressive and modernizing values and ideals. Do we have such a movement in our country at the present time? That is the question. I happen to think that we do; however, I also think that individuals who correspond to this type in our society tragically generally tend not to see themselves as part of a movement, a trend.
Ultimately, the bottom line is this: Is Buhari himself cut in the mold of a truly progressive and modernizing statesman and will the Party of which he is Head by virtue of being the President be a party of destiny that will do what needs to be done at this particular moment of our history? In another month or two, we shall begin to have the outlines of a plausible answer to this tantalizing question.
Biodun Jeyifo
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